The Rude Pundit - The Courts to the Bush Administration: "Could You Guys Stop Being Such Dicks?"

[meegbear]

When the history of this depraved era is written in years and eras to come, one can look forward to scholarly and popular books, CSPAN-ready conferences and college courses all devoted to answering a single important question: Back at the beginning of the 21st century, was the United States government run by dicks or assholes? Truly, those will be the only choices. It may seem a fine distinction, but actually there's a wide gap, a taint, if you will, between the two.

While this space is far too small to suss out all the differences, let's just put it this way: Saddam Hussein was a dick. The Hutu in Rwanda were assholes. The guy who cuts you off on the road is an asshole. The guy who cuts you off and then deliberately slows down is a dick. Hitler was a dick. Mussolini was an asshole. Khrushchev was a dick. Stalin was an asshole. One might say that a dick is merely an asshole with balls, but, no, for many reasons rhetorically and anatomically, that does not work. Perhaps it's best to put this in crude terms: you can't aim the shit that comes out of your asshole with the pinpoint accuracy a man has when he's pissing. It a matter of context, too. One who might have been considered an asshole at one time can now be fully seen as a dick. Hence the reason we have historians.

When it comes to the Bush administration, the label is shifting and unstable. But yesterday, a couple of decisions by very different courts came squarely down on the "dick" side.

The Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said the FCC needs to stop being such dicks when it comes to "fleeting" use of spontaneously spoken bad words, like at awards shows or sports events. Ya gotta love any court decision that cites "President Bush’s remark to British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the United Nations needed to 'get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit' and Vice President Cheney’s widely-reported 'Fuck yourself' comment to Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the U.S. Senate" as evidence supporting the television networks fighting the FCC. But the gist of the decision is this line, late in its text: "The FCC is free to regulate indecency, but its regulatory powers are bounded by the Constitution." Or, in other words, the Bush administration needs to stop being such dicks.

More importantly, military courts in Guantanamo Bay tossed out cases against two long-term detainees because of the fucktardery of the entire system. Follow the bouncing ball of legal nut-gnarls: the Military Commissions Act of 2006, passed after the Supreme Court called bullshit on the military tribunals in the Hamdan case, says, pretty fuckin' clearly, "A military commission under this chapter shall have jurisdiction to try any offense made punishable by this chapter or the law of war when committed by an alien unlawful enemy combatant before, on, or after September 11, 2001." See, a plain ol' enemy combatant gets Geneva Conventions protections, and the act's clear about the distinction. And how does one determine if a detainee is lawful or not? Why, through another hearing by the "Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal." Problem is, the Bush administration hasn't proved jackshit about the detainees. Problem is, no one's been officially designated as "unlawful." And without that standing, well, shit, the court's got no standing to hear the case. Thus the clusterfuck of justice continues with two military tribunals asking the government if, just for a little a while, they could stop being such dicks and maybe follow even the barest fig leaf of a law.

Of course, these cases may be appealed to the Supreme Court, where, as we are learning, the delicate combination of dicks and assholes enables them to demonstrate how we're all fucked.

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